The vines wait
Two weeks ago I wrote about the onset of spring. Almost overnight it has become official. We set our clocks forward last weekend and on our train ride back from Venice we got to see the effect which that one precious extra hour of evening light can make even so soon after the equinox. As we glided east out of the Veneto and toward the isogloss we could look down from the rails’ embankment and into people’s gardens, gardens full of acid-yellow forsythia, magenta azalea, and fruit trees exploding into sudden blossom like frozen pink fireworks. The vines are holding out. They stand everywhere on both sides of this border in stark profiles tethered to trellises which are so orderly in their geometry that they create a strobing effect on the eye as the train whirs past at 120 km/h. I enjoy this trippy visual candy in a way I cannot when I am driving through the same scenery. The same thing happens when we pass by the shady stands of poplars planted in perfect grids, and their blond trunks float and dance and shimmy against the dark shadows in the strobe-light of the setting sun.
The vineyards’ perfect geometry makes me think about how un-Italian it seems to be so meticulous about anything related to the creation of wine, wine we’ve been drinking in rich spring quantities in our own back garden evenings with our visiting family. The vines come straight up out of the earth to shoulder-height where they branch at right-angles, creating perfect crosses, and it’s hard not to think of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who traveled from all over Europe to die fighting under Hindenburg and Cadorna and a young Erwin Rommel over this quiet place 90 springs ago. Orderly ranks of their headstones dot the landscape all around this borderland, but the viney crucifixes are more common by far and they wait, on the very verge of producing buds and shoots and tendrils in their green billions.
